As a technique for reducing the management cost of a storage system (storage apparatus), a virtualization technique of a storage system is mentioned. This technique realizes unified management of various kinds of storage systems different in the management method by this virtualization technique to thereby reduce the management cost and increase the user-friendliness of the storage systems.
Patent Document 1 relates to the virtualization technique of the storage system. Patent Document 1 discloses a computer system in which a second storage system is connected to a first storage system connected to a host computer. The computer system provides a volume of the second storage system as a volume of the first storage system to the host computer. In this configuration, the second storage system is concealed from the host computer, and all read/write requests of the host computer are issued to the first storage system. When the read/write requests received from the host computer are performed to the volume of the second storage system, the first storage system issues the requests to the second storage system to cause the second storage system to execute the read/write requests. Thus, an administrator of the storage may manage substantially only the first storage system, so that the management man-hours of the storage system can be sharply reduced.
On the other hand, a technique referred to as an SDS (Software Defined Storage) has drawn attention in recent years. The technique is a technique of realizing functions of the storage system by software operable in a general purpose server. Heretofore, a vendor has provided a storage as a dedicated device (software+hardware). However, when the SDS is provided, a vendor provides only software for the SDS (which is referred to as a storage control program in this specification) to a user, and then the user installs the software in hardware (general purpose server) prepared by himself/herself to thereby achieve building of a storage system.